dovecot - Feb 2006 - Out of memory problem

Hi guys,

Running SuSe 9.3 with dovecot 1.0.alpha3 source installation.

One of the users has quite a lot of important email in a folder, but 
when he trys to view this folder, it either sits and waits, and then 
times out, or just logs out straight away.

Looking in the log(/var/log/mail), I'm getting the following error.

Feb  6 09:22:08 mail postfix/qmgr[27221]: 198B96D1CE: removed
Feb  6 09:22:08 mail dovecot: imap(ralphs): pool_system_malloc(): Out of 
memory
Feb  6 09:22:08 mail dovecot: child 23018 (imap) returned error 83 (Out 
of memory)

I've searched around on google for this error and haven't found anything
useful as of yet.

My next step is to upgrade to the latest version of dovecot, but this is 
quite a large company, and I will need to wait until after hours to do 
the upgrade.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Neil Wilson
DcData
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On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 11:29 +0200, Neil Wilson wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Running SuSe 9.3 with dovecot 1.0.alpha3 source installation.
> 
> One of the users has quite a lot of important email in a folder, but 
> when he trys to view this folder, it either sits and waits, and then 
> times out, or just logs out straight away.
How many messages does the mailbox have?
> Feb  6 09:22:08 mail postfix/qmgr[27221]: 198B96D1CE: removed
> Feb  6 09:22:08 mail dovecot: imap(ralphs): pool_system_malloc(): Out of 
> memory
> Feb  6 09:22:08 mail dovecot: child 23018 (imap) returned error 83 (Out 
> of memory)
You could try increasing mail_process_size to larger than the default
256MB. Although that should have been enough for even mailboxes with
tens of thousands of messages..

One possibility would also be that the mailbox's index files are broken
and Dovecot tries to allocate too much memory, which fails. You could
try deleting them and reopening the mailbox. But please make a copy of
those files first and if deleting them helps, send them to me so I can
try to fix that bug permanently.

dovecot.index and dovecot.index.log files don't contain any sensitive
information, but dovecot.index.cache may contain message subjects,
from/to/etc. fields, so you might not want to send that without
overwriting that data (I could write a program to do that).